Girl meets boy. Her father is rich, his is dead. Dad doesn't want daughter to marry the boy. The villain kidnaps her. Boy saves her. And all is well. In between, of course, boy's widowed mother cries and moulds laddoos for her son.

Time was when, week after week, cinemagoers thronged the theatres to see a Hindi film that largely revolved around this theme. Those that didn't focused on siblings separated at fairs. In the years that followed, film stories seldom stepped off the narrow path - sticking to themes such as unhappy families and lovers.

But the times are changing. Consider these new films and their storylines: Piku is about a potty-obsessed father on a road trip with his daughter. Tanu Weds Manu Returns is about a man torn between his difficult wife and a girl from rural India. Dum Laga Ke Haisha is about an overweight but spunky bride married to a man who is ashamed of her. NH10 is about a couple's holiday turning into a nightmare. Queen, the runaway hit of 2014, is about a girl who is jilted by her fiancé just before the wedding. Each film has a plot that has caught the fancy of the filmgoer.

"I do what I feel is right," explains Himanshu Sharma, the man behind the story of Tanu Weds Manu Returns. "My focus is on giving shape to my story and let my characters do all the talking."

The films with a storyline are huge successes, too. Tanu Weds Manu Returns became the first film of 2015 to cross the Rs 100-crore mark at the box office. Piku has garnered around Rs 75 crore, said to be almost five times its cost. Dum Laga Ke Haisha has grossed Rs 30 crore, a profit of Rs 18 crore.

On the other hand, some of the big banner films of 2015 have fallen by the wayside. Anurag Kashyap's Bombay Velvet (Rs 115 crore), the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Shamitabh (Rs 50 crore) and Hawaizaada (Rs 25 crore) have failed to make a mark.

Coming on the heels of the successful films of 2014 such as Queen and Filmistaan (about a Bollywood fan who is kidnapped), these story-centric films with tight scripts, slick direction and good acting underline the role being played by scriptwriters.

"Content is clearly the king," Piku director Shoojit Sircar says. "The audience wants to take back something home from the film."

The scriptwriter of Piku, Juhi Chaturvedi, would agree. To get the script right, she works and reworks on it, visualising how ad guru Piyush Pandey, her ex-boss, would react to the lines. "If he didn't like something he would say, 'bakwaas hai', and I would go back and re-write those lines. I always have that in the back of my mind," Chaturvedi says.

Scripts today are not just about a storyline. They deal with emotions that people can identify with, dialects and regional accents that sound genuine, and storylines that entertain, yet sound realistic. And this means a lot of work beyond the drafting board. Sharma and Tanu Weds Manu Returns director Aanand L. Rai, for instance, had to travel extensively to meet a wide spectrum of people to get the details right. One of the heroines spoke Haryanvi, and they had to ensure that the speech was right and the accent just so.

Many of the scriptwriters stick to themes and nuances they are familiar with. Chaturvedi says that she gets inspired by the people and places around her. The character of Bhaskor Banerjee in Piku was inspired by her grandfather. For Vicky Donor, a 2012 hit, most of the characters were drawn from people she'd met while living in the Punjabi-dominated residential colony of Lajpat Nagar in Delhi.

"You just need to look for stories and characters very closely and you will find them everywhere," she says.

Indeed, many of the successful scripts have dealt with people and stories of cities and smaller towns which were not the staple of Bollywood, where the city of Mumbai has always ruled.

"But Mumbai is now dead for stories," avers Kamlesh Pandey, scriptwriter of Rang De Basanti (RDB), which dealt with a group of youngsters seeking to make a difference. "People have milked the mafia, slums and local politics. The real stories have to be set in cities, towns and villages from other parts of the country. I am glad that new-age filmmakers are thinking on those lines."

Tanu Weds Manu Returns moved from London and Kanpur to Delhi and Jhajjar in Haryana; Dum Laga Ke Haisha was set in Haridwar; Piku in Delhi, Calcutta and a highway. NH10, starring Anushka Sharma, was set in Haryana.

"Over the years many people from mofussil India have moved to bigger cities and towns and when they see a film talking their language, they feel that their stories are being told," scriptwriter Sharma says. "And a good story can belong to any place. It will have a universal appeal."

Writing, Pandey of RDB holds, was so far the "weakest link" in Bollywood. The general secretary of the Film Writers' Association (FWA) points to a message written on the door of the FWA office in Andheri (West), Mumbai: The screenwriter is the first star of a film or TV show because before the screenwriter, a film or TV show is just a blank piece of paper.

"Directors and producers may be taking the message seriously that for a good film a great script is paramount," he says.

Of course, old mindsets don't change that easily either. Sharath Katariya, the writer and director of Dum Laga Ke Haisha, says that for seven years he approached every production house before Yash Raj Films decided to have a serious look at it.

"Some people thought that it was probably more of an indie film since it was set in Haridwar. Thankfully I stuck to my story. I am glad that it saw the light of day and people loved it," Katariya says.

Yet, film wallahs stress that the trend - however catchy - is not likely to change the overall tenor of Bollywood.

Actor-director Naseeruddin Shah, for one, believes that films with scripts are still the exception rather than the rule in Mumbai. "Films are made with a calculation to provide the maximum thrill to maximum people and to multiply their investment tenfold," Shah says. And he cites the mega hit PK, starring Aamir Khan, as an example.

Shah points out that well-made films with good scripts can also sink, like Rajat Kapoor's Ankhon Dekhi, a 2014 film about a middle-aged man who leads a nondescript life in Delhi. The film would have succeeded "if it were given a chance", he adds.

That could be true. Almost all the hit films, although of modest budgets, were backed by major production houses or had established stars. For instance if Tanu Weds Manu Returns had Kangana Ranaut, Piku had Amitabh Bachchan and Deepika Padukone, and Dum Laga Ke Haisha had Ayushmann Khurrana and was produced by Yash Raj Films.

Likewise, it was the presence of Aamir Khan that eventually helped in the making of RDB (2006). "I was ready with the script for almost six months. [Director] Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and I visited many production houses. But nobody was willing to take a serious look at the script. It was only after Aamir Khan came on board that people started taking an interest," Pandey says.

Kapoor, whose Ankhon Dekhi won several awards, says that films like his without stars or the backing of big production houses seldom stand a chance. "Audiences lose out. And I lose out as I don't seek big stars or big banners for my films," he says.

But alongside this, what is also true is that the movement for good scripts is gaining ground. And the trend is underlined by the publication of scripts. Last year, for instance HarperCollins brought out a box set of the original screenplays of Vishal Bhardwaj's three films, Maqbool, Omkara and Haider. And they were sold out within days.

"The response was really great. Now when I visit film schools and other such places, people always ask me if we can come up with more such books. Most of the requests are for films with great screenplays," says Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, managing editor, HarperCollins.

Some hope that the trend will one day define Bollywood. Delhi-based theatre director N.K. Sharma, mentor to several actors and directors including Sircar, Deepak Dobriyal and Khurrana, says that these films could be setting a base for a bigger change in the Hindi film industry.

"These films challenge the conventional storytelling and formula-driven formats of Bollywood. If they inspire even a few scriptwriters and filmmakers to think out-of-the-box and make daring films, Hindi film could see many changes in coming years," Sharma sums up.